Blogging has been part of the web landscape for over a decade and has matured into a ubiquitous mode of live communication. The power of blogging has been recognized by the business community, and canny marketers view it as a powerful weapon in their digital arsenal. Done well, blogging can bring myriad benefits to businesses of any size. Done badly, it can cause more harm than good. Central to the success of any business blog is a thorough understanding of the technology. This book will give you a competitive advantage by helping you to create an engaging, effective, and well polished business blog.

WordPress allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with many outstanding features. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users, who have created a large and diverse collection of plug-ins. It has various features that can help business bloggers to boost their business strategy.

This book will take you beyond the basics of WordPress, helping you take full advantage of its rich and powerful features to transform your basic blog into a more advanced and professional blog as quickly and painlessly as possible. You will learn everything you need to know to extend and grow your business blog. You will learn to mange the content including images and videos, which will make your blog more appealing. You'll also learn how to market and measure the success of your blog using Google web applications and other popular tools. So, if want to transform your business blog to give a kick start to your business this book is for you.

This book deals with using WordPress and third-party tools to manage and optimize your blog, focusing on the business aspects of blogging. It is not an introduction to WordPress and does not cover the basics such as installation or how to post. Most readers will already have an established WordPress blog or will at least be in the advanced stages of planning one.

What you will learn from this book?

• Develop a `blogging business plan': clarify your blogging goals and sketch out a process for achieving them in WordPress
• Build a custom theme: so that the look of your blog immediately communicates your brand to visitors
• Engage with the blogosphere: create beneficial relationships with other bloggers, making the most of each other's traffic and customers
• Optimize your site for search: incorporate good SEO practices into your blog posting and planning
• Use social media marketing such as Digg, Reddit, Facebook, and Del.icio.us to drive traffic to your blog
• Monitor visitors and analyze their activity using WordPress.com stats, Feedburner for your RSS feeds, and Google Analytics
• Manage adverts and implement revenue-generating features using Google AdSense with the Adsense Manager plugin
• Incorporate multimedia on your blog, including video and image galleries
   

Approach

This is a practical, hands-on book based around a fictitious case study blog, which you will build on a development server using WordPress. The case study grows chapter by chapter, from installing your local development server, right up to the finished blog.

The book starts by looking at the important features that make a successful business blog: adding value to your products and services, providing proper customer service and support, driving traffic to your website, and so on. It then shows how to implement these features in WordPress. It provides clear instructions and detailed screenshots, so you can see exactly what to do at each step of the build. You will install and configure a selection of WordPress plug-ins to improve the functionality of the case-study blog.

When you have completed the case study, you will have the knowledge and confidence to apply all the techniques you have learned to your own WordPress business blog.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for anybody running or starting a business blog using WordPress. Whether you plan to use your blog for PR and marketing, or want to profit directly from blogging, this book offers you everything you need.

As we want to get into the specifics of business blogging as quickly as possible, we don't cover the WordPress basics. So it's best to have some experience with WordPress before you start with this book.

The book mainly focuses on a self-hosted WordPress installation, but most of the advice also applies to blogs hosted on WordPress.com.